Supermicro SuperServer 5018A-FTN4 Rackmount Server

The 5018A-FTN4 is equipped with an Atom C2758 processor based on the new Silvermont architecture which is reportedly a big step up from previous Atoms. Our benchmarks concur with this assessment.

In single-threaded tests, the C2758 was over 4x faster than the Atom N2600, and it easily leapfrogged over the AMD A6-1450 APU found in Samsung's ATIV Book 9 Lite budget ultrabook. It's not up to snuff with low-end Ivy Bridge based chips but the massive improvement is nothing to sneeze at.

The C2758 also happens to have 8 cores which really helped in our multi-threaded video encoding tests. TMPGEnc and HandBrake performance was comparable to the AMD A8-5600K. To see an Atom catch up to a full-fledged quad-core desktop chip when running such demanding tasks is simply astonishing.

Network Performance

Pit against a couple of desktop boards and the MicroServer Gen8, the SuperServer delivered the best network performance of the bunch, winning our speed tests with 1MB, 10MB, and 100MB packet sizes. It's also notable that the 5018A-FTN4 doesn't have just one Intel I354 gigabit ethernet adapter, it has four.